


The Rational Fear of Realtors

by kiwikami



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket, The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Also Babies' Teeth Aren't Normally That Sharp, Arson, But Definitely Some Canon-Typical Leeches (ASoUE), Canon-Typical The Spiral Content (The Magnus Archives), Canonical Character Death, Dissociation, Eventual Happy Ending, Featuring the Voyeuristic Filing Department, Fluff, Gen, Horror, Humor, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, In Which Count Olaf is an Avatar of the Stranger, Mental Breakdown, Minor Body Horror, No Canon-Typical Worms (The Magnus Archives), Paranoia, Probably All At Once, Salmon - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:27:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27278713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiwikami/pseuds/kiwikami
Summary: "Never use the doorknob. I'm always afraid that it will shatter into a million pieces and that one of them will hit my eye."The worlds of TMA and ASoUE mesh very nicely. This is a story about two people marked by Beholding, who fought fires and spiraling madness and crawling things, until eventually all that was left of them was a story to be told by a man who knew far too much about things that he had never been there to see. They were trusting, and caring, and beloved, and overcome by fear. One became a dowager, hidden away in a house on a cliff. One became, among many other things, and places, and people... a realtor.This is about how Aunt Josephine met the Distortion. It is also about other things. Such as salmon.
Relationships: Ike Anwhistle/Josephine Anwhistle
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4





	The Rational Fear of Realtors

**Author's Note:**

> This started as a bit of a joke in a Discord chat. Then I started worldbuilding. Then I got really invested in the worldbuilding. Then it got weird.
> 
> This is a crossover between A Series of Unfortunate Events and The Magnus Archives; TMA knowledge is a bit more important than ASoUE knowledge here since this is largely from the perspective of a TMA character. ASoUE events are a bit of a book/movie hybrid; I've never read AtWQ and am basing VFD-related details mostly on the wiki, so please forgive any inaccuracies and/or blame them on Spiral interference.
> 
>  **Chapter-Specific Warnings** : TMA-typical Spiral weirdness, super brief self-harm (from "Perhaps if his flesh" to "The map directed him"), description of an executive-dysfunction-related breakdown ("it _was_ a heart" to "up, up, up"). Please, please let me know if there's something else you'd like tagged.

Statement of Beatrice Baudelaire II, regarding something approximating a happy ending. Original statement date unknown. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist.

_"Hi. Jon Sims? You don't know me, sorry, but my uncle has spoken highly of you. Him, I assume, you know? Do the watchers watch each other? It took a very long time to convince him I was who I said I was. You can, of course, just ask, if we should ever meet in person. I have some things to tell you - not my own words, exactly, and not ones you'll especially want to hear, at first. I would tell you to stop reading, that what's to come is dreadfully unpleasant, and all of that. But I know you can't._

_My uncle explained all about it. Besides, I'm certain you've heard far worse._

_This is something someone was told to tell me, so I'm telling you, because Lemony said it wasn't something he needed to know. I thought things like you needed to know everything? I'll ask him about it later._

_The point is, I think you and my family have a couple of mutual friends."_

\-----

Colors are some of our most beautiful lies.

They are, like all of human perception, a comforting fiction of the meat brain. Some bundles of matter reflect certain wavelengths of light more so than others; we use these distinctions to help recognize them as _objects_ , and we assign some of them the label of _being red_. Is that true? Michael had never taken a proper physics class. Some humans perceive _being red_ as identical to the concept of _being green_ , and we collectively agree that this is an anomaly, a kind of color-blindness. That must be true, certainly.

It was true of Michael, once.

But no one protests that we should also distinguish _blue_ and _blue-shaded-with-ultraviolet_. What a shame. A lovely color, that. _Plorple_ , Michael would call it eventually. Or had he already, by now? We see very little, he had begun to realize. _Red_ and _green_ are simply a shared agreement among a population of electrified flesh. They are not intrinsic to the foundations of the universe. They are arbitrary. They are not _true_.

Michael Shelley stopped for a moment as this thought slipped across the bone just under his eye, the concept of _untruth_ inching its way like an icy leech from one neuron to the next. Time still meant something to him then, because he still felt as if it should, and there was still enough of his electricity and his meat left to understand that the wallpaper was a color that he had never seen. A cool-toned purple-a-bit-to-the-left which tasted like too-sweet watermelon and lighter fluid. _Plorple_ , he decided to call it. Had decided some time ago? The floor here was cheap linoleum cut into repeating fake-stone shapes, tiling together at odd angles that hurt to walk on.

It was cold. Like ice cream. It probably tasted worse than ice cream. He chose not to check, this time.

He could no longer focus on any one thought for longer than it took to check the map or open a door, but the idea came to pull his winter coat tighter around himself, and he wondered for a moment if it only seemed to be working because the fur lining was itself fake, and thus well-insulated against cold-that-wasn't. Perhaps the swirling pattern of his mismatched woolen socks provided some protection against the paintings lining the halls.

Perhaps if his flesh was less real, he would be warmer.

He dug his fingernails into the skin of his arm to peel away the _realness_ of it. He brought what was left to his face and whispered some lies about colors into the holes he had carved. He wrapped his coat tighter and felt the buttons melt into his ribs. His sinew was nothing but _blue_ and _yellow_ now, fibrous tissue drawn taught by the pull of conflicting abstractions, but he still did not feel any less cold.

The map directed him to break a mirror. How many years of bad luck was he up to? Michael had long since... just begun... starting to... something, something, tenses, verb conjugation... he used to talk about grammar with someone, a friend... regardless, he still sometimes forgot to forget to look in them, and now and then caught a glimpse. Curls and freckles and frostbitten ears.

The hallway walls leaned away from him, from this shivering warm meat-thing, as if they knew they'd be bound to it one day and didn't want a sneak preview of what a horrible thing it would be to view themselves in a mirror.

His eyes met themselves, and Michael Shelley knew he was still sane.

( _What if-_ )

The mirror shattered in a fractal pattern where he punched it, fist wrapped in the old knitted scarf he'd grabbed at the last minute before leaving to board the Tundra. The hallway beyond had matching knitted walls and floors in that same shade of off-gray, the kind that smelled a little like smoke. He brought the scarf to his face and breathed it in, mirror shards stinging his lungs, before it could blend into the walls and aid the architecture in its persistent attempts to strangle him.

He could remember the smell of smoke, at least. And where there was smoke, there was-

\-----

"Is it the, ah, the Flameless... what were they called?"

He remembered this conversation. He had been standing in Gertrude's office, bag half-packed, fishing for just a little more information about what, exactly, he was about to catch a plane to go witness. She had drip-fed him details in a shroud of platitudes and frustration. Whatever he was meant to be dealing with, it was clearly not high in her priorities.

"No. No, this is something entirely different," she responded absently. "There's likely nothing to it. He's no stranger to baseless threats."

"Oh. Good. That's good, then."

“ _However_ , Gregor Anwhistle is an old acquantence of mine, and I think it would put his mind at ease to have someone there to... investigate. A bit of reassurance. Goodness knows his own people have been less than helpful in that regard."

"And... what if someone does, you know, try to burn the place down while I'm there?"

"Well, then, I trust you'll do your best to stop it." She smiled up at him with the confident look of a kind old woman who expects her friend and assistant to do his best, to take care of these sorts of things, to jump on command and intuit how high she means. "I'm sure you can handle a little bit of arson. All you'd need is a good hose piping seawater, and you'll have plenty of that there."

Michael doubted Gertrude realized the damage even just "a little bit of arson" could do, but he wasn't about to worry her.

"Of course! Er... is there anything else you need, before I go?"

"No thank you, Michael. I'll see you in a week."

And that was that.

Halfway through his flight, Michael pulled out the folder Gertrude had provided on Anwhistle Aquatics. It was very thin, containing a single picture of a lighthouse-topped building that teetered atop a jagged island, streaked with salt and bird droppings. There was a faded flyer describing its nature as a marine research center involved in - salmon training? Could that be right? He was having a difficult time parsing exactly what was meant by "fish domestication" (voluntary or not), and the informational brochure - or what little of it he could actually read behind its "fun" and "quirky" font choice - was not especially forthcoming.

There was also a list of instructions, in Gertrude's handwriting, on how to make contact with Gregor Anwhistle himself.

"What is this, some sort of... of spy novel?" Michael muttered, reading through the intricate sequence of coded statements he was expected to repeat if he found himself in increasingly unlikely situations. “ _I didn't realize this was a sad occasion?_ ”

A flight attendant stopped at his seat for a moment, said something which he missed, and stared expectantly. Had he met her eyes, perhaps he would have taken notice. He was familiar, by then, with what it felt like to be Seen. But he didn't look up from his instructions - he was far too worried that he would miss some detail and flub the entire interaction. She spoke a little louder, now offering him some very fresh diet Pepsi, which he declined as his cup was still half-full, and then continued down the aisle with an air of dismissal. Neither would ever see the other again. It's possible both would have survived longer if they had.

In the end he arrived at this other place quietly, without incident, just as he had done so much in his life.

Anwhistle Aquatics was nowhere near the airport. In fact, it was very far from most things, being on a rock in the ocean. The bus ride was empty and still and gray, the bus driver equally so, and just as he was about to fall asleep in his seat, Michael was dropped off in a tiny fishing village. The sign by the bus stop looked as if it might once have said _Widdershire_ , but time and rain had worn the letters half-away.

" _Dire_ ," Michael said to himself, reading what remained. "Well. I suppose it's better than sitting around at a desk all day, isn't it?"

There was nearly no movement in the streets, but for a couple of fishermen outside what might have been a general store, weighing baskets upon baskets of lipstick-pink salmon. The road ended in a long dock, and the skies were clear enough that from its edge, Michael could just make out the distant rock, and the long beam of light which had just begun to sweep over the sea.

It was early evening, now, and he was struck by a sudden panic that he would not make it there within business hours. He'd really rather not interrupt Mr. Anwhistle after closing time. He stared out at the calm water and was struck by the irrational urge to swim out to the island, to throw himself into the waves and doggy paddle as if his life depended on it, as if otherwise he would arrive somehow _too late_.

But there were fishing boats tied to the dock nearby and a bundle of very non-waterproof papers in his suitcase, so reason prevailed.

\-----

Michael Shelley's feet were wet. It was probably just that the snow had finally melted in his winter boots, but it was a little funny, as he'd just been thinking about the sea. He trudged across the knitted floor, which gave gently beneath him, his feet and legs sometimes slipping between gaps in the weave and emerging in some other hole in the yarn halfway up the wall. He reached up absently to scratch an itch on his ankle and continued. The map showed a turn ahead in a direction one could describe as right-north-right. This place was playing its usual tricks, but he knew them well by now. He could not trust what he saw, because it would change. It was the integrity of the world that was in question, not that of his own thoughts.

He was still sa-... he was still as sane as he had ever been.

\-----

"I can pay you! Of course. I mean, I wouldn't expect you to- to take me anywhere for free. Obviously." Michael chuckled, one part nerves and one part exhaustion as he pleaded with the salmon-sorting fisherman.

This was, strictly speaking, the second salmon-sorter he'd solicited. The starting salmon-sorter had stared, sniffed, scoffed, and informed him in no uncertain terms that he wasn't a _ferry_ service and that he wasn't all too fond of all these _academic_ types coming around. "Only good thing about that place is the fish they let out," he had said, brandishing one at Michael like a large, floppy machete.

The other, younger man rolled his eyes and grabbed the fish from the elder. "Aw, am I an _academic_ now, Philand? Hang on, let me just clean off all this _chalk dust_ and _gold filigree_ ," he said, wiping his hands on the other man's sleeve and leaving a trail of fish innards.

Michael felt mildly ill.

"Your folks actually do the dirty work, that's not so bad. It's that _place_. You can feel it watching you. And the types who come around looking for it..."

"-are a valuable source of business." The younger man cracked a broad smile and turned to Michael. "Speaking of which, can I interest you in some nice salmon steaks? Salmon puffs? Salmon paste? Lox? Pickled salmon tail?"

"Oh, no, I just-"

"Pickled salmon _eyes_?" And then he winked. Conspiratorily. As if that was supposed to mean something.

"I just need a ride out to the research center." Michael huffed in frustration. " _Please_."

"Sure, sure." The man gave his companion a friendly shove. "I'll back to help in hour or so, Phil. Try not to scare any more tourists?"

-

The man led Michael back down the dock and to a little blue boat that seemed to be in decent repair, with a small but shiny outboard motor and the words _T/T QUEEQUEG_ stenciled along the side.

“Moby Dick?”

“Hm?”

“The name.” Michael gestured at the letters as he settled onto the wide seat. “You know, the character from the novel. Ishmael's friend?”

His new friend raised an eyebrow. “Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.”

“I...” This was not a conversation topic Michael had a prepared response for. “Is it?”

“A quote.” The man grinned, his face lighting up in dimples. “From the novel. About Queequeg. Sorry, my stepdad reads it to my sister a lot. You pick things up, you know?” He started the motor, and the boat began to draw steadily further from the dock. Michael gripped the seat with a sudden apprehension. Little whirlpools spiraled out of sight in the boat's wake.

“Have you, ah... have you lived here long?” Small talk. That's a thing people were expected to do!

“Mhm. Good bit of my life. Got a bit dragged away from it all, you know.” Another conspiratorial wink that Michael wasn't sure how to interpret. “But my family's from the area. Came back to help out when Anwhistle built his whole-” he waved at the approaching island “-thing. I mostly work out there, but when it's quiet I help the folks in town. Like to get my hands into things.”

“So you know Gregor, then? Any idea what to expect?”

He shrugged. “He's... fine? Good man. Little paranoid. Little lonely. Living out here, I think it gets to you a bit. Not too many researchers nowadays, just him, me, the secretary, a couple more volunteers who come and go. I think his folks are still here – they came up for a visit – so he's probably in a good mood. You're in luck!”

 _In luck_ was not a phrase Michael would use to describe his feelings as the crags loomed closer, the lighthouse swaying on great wooden stilts overhead. Though the rock was streaked with bird droppings, there were no birds to be heard or seen. They pulled up to a tiny dock at the bottom of a steep metal stairway that clung to the cliff by strength of will alone. Michael gazed up at its flights of switchbacks and silently celebrated that he wasn't afraid of heights.

“Gonna have to leave you here, sorry.” The man wrung his hands a bit. “Still got more to do on shore. Let Gregor know when you need to get back, though, or just call – there's phone service at the top of the lighthouse if you sort of hold it up and wave it around a bit.”

“Will do. Thank you! I really appreciate it, Mr.-”

But the man was gone, and in the rapidly-fading light Michael couldn't be certain if the little blue boat was disappearing into the fog, or the darkness, or the twisting shapes between the waves, or if there had ever really been a man there at all. He shook himself and grabbed the stairway's railing. the beam of the lighthouse swept over his head, bathing his curls in gold.

It felt warm. Not friendly, but almost like home.

With renewed energy, Michael Shelley bounded up the cliff in the dark towards Anwhistle Aquatics.

\-----

With renewed energy, Michael Shelley broke through the boarded-up door that blocked what the map claimed was the next passage. It opened into the inside of his stomach, and he coughed up splintered wood before stepping through. The flesh walls were warm stone - were empty void - were a velvet bag.

There must be a heart to this place, he reasoned. That must be where the map was taking him.

The world was lying to him, but his own mind was intact. He could still read the directions. All he had to do was follow, and not believe anything that he saw, or felt, or tasted.

Or was.

The heart was above the stomach, and indeed the map led him to a ladder made of sawdust, but it was headed down, not up, and as he descended he could feel something creep behind his eyes, the pain of confused perception not unlike that sleep-sickness of a double-overnighter, the bleary throb of the fifth page of a writeup for some statement investigation that any of the other assistants could have written in a few hours ( _he's just ~~lazy~~ ~~stupid~~ a failure_), whose paragraphs made syntactic sense without semantic content, the colorless green ideas sleeping furiously at him while his own brain poisons itself in absence of a nap, just a moment, just a minute...

( _What if-_ )

...It _was_ a heart. He was right. A little paper heart-shaped card, just like the one he'd had the whole archives staff sign for Gertrude when he realized the poor woman had no family or loved ones on Valentine's Day.

But when he opened it, it became just another door, and the map guided him through, and the tunnel became a hole and gravity pulled him further into somewhere else because of course it couldn't be that easy, and how was it that he could manage to be so _stupid,_ it's not all that difficult a thing to do, so clearly it's a problem with him, he's the problem, there's something wrong with him and he just can't _think_ right but if he could just try a little harder - follow the map, finish the research, get to the end, **_she's counting on you, Michael_**...

( _What if this place is-_ )

...And he thinks about stopping but the bowling-alley carpet of the library floor has begun to writhe and it's only minutes now until dawn, and then he has to - you have to - clock in for work, so you might as well keep typing although your skull throbs and you no longer have emotions and every twitch of your eyes leaves a motion blur across the uncaring white screen of the word processor program, and you would scream but the sound of any human voice leaves you curled in your chair, hands twisted, frozen and barely breathing until...

( _What if this place is perfectly normal, and my mind is the one playing tricks? What if I'm really just frozen on the deck of the Tundra and Gertrude is trying to comfort me and I can't hear her over the sound of breaking mirrors? What if I never went inside that door? What if whatever I saw on that island_ broke _me? What an idiot. What a burden on the others. Gertrude, I failed you, I'm so sorry, I-_ )

...Until some unseen internal timer decides you can move again, can force your eyes open just for one more moment ( _-but what if you can't, what if you just sit here catatonic, every touch painful, every thought painful, unsleeping and unthinking forever, I'm so sorry, Gertrude, you were counting on me and I failed-_ ), can ignore how the carpet now has surged forth and begun to cover your feet and legs in its erratic pattern and drag you down, down, down-

\-----

-Up, up, up, and then, at last, something that had to be the front door. It was plain and white, with a little “Reception” plaque, and under that a sticky note reading “Come In! (doorbell broken)”, right beside a doorbell button that indeed seemed to have been melted into the wall.

Michael took a breath, and... oh. Well, then.

If the exterior of this building was unusually dark and dismal, it was only because the front hall of Anwhistle Aquatics had so successfully banished that sentiment that it left all bad feelings to lurk outside in shame. The floor was tiled in gold and green, the walls a warm dark wood with a lattice of beams and columns supporting the high ceiling – a single large beam stretched lengthwise along the entire hall, and from it a whale skeleton was suspended by rivets and wire. Along the top of the wall, near the ceiling, were rows of stained glass windows, each in an identical pattern too distant and shadowed to identify.

Through them, now and then, Michael could see the lighthouse beam as it passed.

The walls were covered in framed maps and hyper-realistic drawings of various sea creatures, all strategically arranged – here an anglerfish poised so that its lure was illuminated by a wall plinth, here a squid atop a table piled high with inkwells. In one corner stood an old globe, in another a massive tank filled with striped, silvery fish. The brass lamp fixtures gleamed, and the dust motes that caught their light dutifully settled elsewhere. Almost like the archives, it smelled of ink and the faintest undertones of dispassionate sterility, but here the scent was smothered under fish and stone and seaweed - and something sweet and warm being baked, not far away.

Michael scraped his boots on the mat self-consciously. There was a receptionist's desk at the far end of the room, which he approached, staring up at the whale skeleton with a little apprehension. At least it seemed reasonably well-secured. From the distance, he could hear a faint, muffled whistling.

The desk was empty, so he tapped on the little brass bell and turned to the sign-in book which lay open. “WELCOME!” it proclaimed in bold, gold letters on the top of each page, followed by a string of names. Most gave their purpose for visiting as “Volunteer” - there were also a few for Mr. Anwhistle himself, his purpose listed as “I live here!”, and two from several days prior which shared his surname.

Michael signed his own name, ending the final Y with a little curlicue just as the door behind the desk opened. The man who emerged was tall, with thinning brown hair and a mustache that more than made up for it in quantity, wielding a cheerful smile and an oven mitt on each hand.

“Aha!” he cried, staring at Michael through a thick pair of blue-lensed glasses.

“A...ha?”

“Aha! A visitor! One moment.” He pulled open several drawers of the desk, oven mitts requiring several tries per drawer handle, and began ruffling through their contents as Michael bounced slightly on his heels. “Let me find you a pen – have to get your name down. Evidence! Do you have a match?”

“Oh! No, I already did. I mean, I have one. I mean, a pen, not – not a match. I don't have a match. Sorry.”

“Sorry? Don't be sorry! Soggy place for a match. No dry wood.” The man gestured around the room, which as far as Michael could tell was made mostly of rather dry wood.

“I see.”

“Didn't hear a boat come up. Did you swim?”

“No. No, I got a ride from a fisherman. Or a... sort of... salmon-sorter?" Michael tried and failed to remember if the young man had given his name.

"Oh, good, very good."

"Do people _usually_ swim?”

“Only the ones made of leeches! The rest who try don't make it.” He spun the guest book around and read Michael's entry. “Purpose in coming here?”

“Sorry, I didn't finish writing-”

“No worries! I'll pen it in for you, my boy. Why are you here?” The man's eyes pierced through the blue lenses, and Michael felt an itching that he normally associated with Gertrude's more probing questions, something he'd always attributed to a nagging worry that the poor woman was stressing herself out. He was suddenly very certain that this man was Gregor Anwhistle. He was suddenly very uncertain what he was supposed to do.

“I'm, uh... I'm from...” Not the Magnus Institute. That had been clear in the instructions. What was it Gertrude had told him to say? Oh, come on. Come on, he'd gone over everything a dozen times over on the way. He might be a little tired, but he couldn't have forgotten. This was _important_. He was- ah. Yes.

He smiled and held out a hand. The lighthouse cast its gaze into the dark.

“My name's Michael Shelley,” said Michael Shelley, because back then, it was true.

“Yes, I see that. I wasn't expecting anyone, you know,” replied Gregor Anwhistle, who had been expecting many things, but none of the right ones.

“Gertrude Robinson sent me. I'm from the Voyeuristic Filing Department?”

And a dozen stained-glass eyes watched them from above.

**Author's Note:**

> Oh, Michael. T/T doesn't introduce the name of a dinghy, it introduces the name of _the vessel the dinghy is tender to_. Sorry I gave you my ADD and insomnia.
> 
> I... apologize?... for my writing style. I've been told it's a bit verbose, and I'm not especially good at dialogue, so things tend to end up very prose-heavy. Maybe a little purple-prose-heavy. Whoops. Sorry about that. Also, I can't make any promises about how long the next chapter will take, since I am not especially fast at these things. But that said, anyone interested in seeing where this might go? I have _so many worldbuilding ideas_ for this crossover. Lemony Snicket is absolutely an avatar of the Beholding. Count Olaf? Well. He'll turn up in here eventually.
> 
> Thanks for reading, and good luck in all things.


End file.
